


in that swing

by sheepknitssweater



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Different Ways To Deal With Being A Woman, Different Ways To Deal With Gloomy Nineteenth-Century Novels, Different Ways To Deal With Homophobia, F/F, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 14:33:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14813210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepknitssweater/pseuds/sheepknitssweater
Summary: The story ended, always, with, “and you remember the rest of it.” The rest of it: Stella and Bexy’s sudden convergence. Stella remembered this, despite the repetition.Or: Stella Rogers and Bexy Barnes grow up, together and apart.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title is from this quote from my brilliant friend: “I liked to discover connections like that, especially if they concerned Lila. I traced lines between moments and events distant from one another, I established convergences and divergences. In that period it became a daily exercise: the better off I had been in Ischia, the worse off Lila had been in the desolation of the neighborhood; the more I had suffered upon leaving the island, the happier she had become. It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.”

Repetition renders memory indistinct. Stella Rogers’s childhood was repetitious, and so her memories of it were vague. This had been one of many fights--it was for that reason that it didn't really stick.

Bexy remembered. “Four boys, and all of them really wailing on you. And some of them older, too. You could’ve--well, if you'd asked or apologized or something, they would've stopped, but you were just standing there, of course, all brave, and your collar bloodier and bloodier--”

“Okay,” Stella said, rolling her eyes.

Bexy rolled her eyes back. “All right, all right. So I walked up to them and I told them to lay off. And they did.”

Stella wished, for the sake of the story, that Bexy would draw out the rescue. She was grateful, too, that Bexy didn't, because it embarrassed Stella deeply and painfully. This was partly because it was a tidy proof of her own weakness and stupidity and need of rescuing, and partly for another reason. Stella couldn't quite define this one, but it had something to do with her single, carefully protected memory of the fight: the outline of Bexy, two braids swaying slightly, arms crossed and brow resolute with that unimpressed expression she often deployed on not-Stella.

The story ended, always, with, “and you remember the rest of it.” The rest of it: Stella and Bexy’s sudden convergence. Stella remembered this, despite the repetition.

 

* * *

 

Bexy was always at the Rogers apartment, which contained one bedroom, one near-closet (where Stella’s mother slept), an immensely unreliable radiator, and wallpaper you could peel off in sheets and strips like skin from a thumb.

Stella was at the Rogers apartment significantly more often than even Bexy was, on account of living there. Also, on account of Stella’s being sick all the time. She technically went to school, but that only happened three or so out of every four days it was supposed to. Mostly, Stella drew, teared small pieces of wallpaper, and read the same novels over and over, including novels she didn’t much like. _Little Women_ , for example.

Bexy jumped on the foot of her bed and said, “Who do you like best? No, that’s boring. Who’s the most like you, do you think?”

Stella tried to be objective. What was she? She was sick a lot, and she only had the one friend, Bexy, which, Stella guessed, made her shy. Beth was sick and shy, too.

But Stella was also coming to realize within herself, on account of the excessive time she had available for reflection, a capacity for terribleness, which Beth didn’t seem to have. Beth played the piano, too, which Stella couldn’t.

“I think you’re like Jo,” Bexy said. “I don’t know who I’m like.”

“I think you’re like Laurie,” Stella said. This made Bexy turn red and sit down.

 

* * *

 

The Barneses and the Rogerses went to the same church, where Bexy always snuck off to sit with Stella. Stella didn’t mind this, but Bexy’s parents seemed to, as did Stella’s mother, a little.

“Why don’t my mom and I just sit in your row?” Stella asked. Bexy wrinkled her nose. Then she started unbraiding and rebraiding her own hair, discreetly, which she often did in church. Sara Rogers looked apologetically at Jane Barnes, Bexy’s mother. Jane Barnes smiled back with great resignation, general geniality, and some trace amounts of contempt.

Stella liked church. She liked Bexy’s unbraiding and rebraiding, and she liked that the priest said everyone had a capacity for terribleness and that it wasn’t just Stella--Stella was relieved that it wasn’t just her. And she liked stained glass, especially the big stained glass panel of Mary, shrouded in a very holy blue, that glowed with morning every Sunday.

Stella didn’t like Sunday school. She had at first thought that Bexy was rich for their neighborhood, but through the progression of school (which Stella had to attend more often now, sickness or no) and Sunday school and the trace amounts of contempt Mrs. Barnes had in her face when she looked at Mrs. Rogers and all, it was becoming clear that it was the Rogerses who were poor for their neighborhood.

Everybody at Sunday school liked Bexy; almost nobody at Sunday school liked Stella. Bexy mostly talked to Stella, and though this seemed not to seriously affect Bexy’s popularity, Stella still worried that she was contagious, that her apparently vast remove from whatever it was her fellow ten-year-olds valued in all other respects might spread to Bexy. She also, secretly, shamefully, hoped for this. A capacity for terribleness.

Otherwise, there were a very few straight-from-Ireland kids, absolutely destitute, who talked to Stella. Frances Linnane had teeth that managed to at once cross and protrude, and there were gaping holes in the heels of her stockings that peeked up above the backs of her scuffed-gray loafers. Her accent was indecipherably thick; she and Stella mainly made faces at each other.

Frances never even looked at Bexy, which was strange. Usually, this just confused Stella. Sometimes, it filled her with a stinging joy. Once again: a capacity for terribleness.

 

* * *

 

It was said that Jane Rebecca Barnes, called Bexy to avoid confusion with her mother, had a good head on her shoulders. She made good grades, was beloved of every nun that had ever met her, stayed neat, was a very pretty girl, and helped with the babies running around her house, of which there were several. At some point, she stopped making the effort of sitting away from her parents in church. Now, she just waved at Stella, then turned back to whatever kid she was shushing on her mother’s behalf. Stella wondered if she was supposed to move closer to her, but Bexy always looked tired, those Sundays, and Stella didn’t want much to talk to either Bexy’s parents or her baby siblings. She suspected that talking to Bexy would only worsen her mood.

So she sat with her mother, near the Linnanes, because Stella’s mother was Irish, and so could really understand Frances’s mother’s accent and liked talking to her about how different it was, how much it took to adjust. “Didn’t teach Stella any Irish--oh, yes, of course I do regret it,” Sara Rogers said, “but I thought it might make things harder for her even than they had to be. Which, mind you, was already hard enough.” Frances and Stella made faces at each other.

“Do you know Irish?” Stella asked Frances, walking down the steps to Sunday school.

Frances gave her an assessing look. Then she said, quietly, “Yes.” Stella could understand her accent better now.

It turned out that Stella couldn’t confine all of her terribleness to the place in her heart where Bexy lived. The terribleness bled over. She envied Frances.

She also liked Frances, and Frances didn’t have anyone else. “I wish I did,” Stella said.

 

* * *

 

Bexy was sitting, cross-legged, on Stella’s floor. “Can we play Crazy Eights instead? This is boring.”

“Can’t,” Stella said. She was lying in bed, four blankets piled on her legs. “Too much counting. Anyway, you’re going to win.”

“Well, you can probably see my cards from up there, so I’m not sure.”

“I can’t!”

“Sure,” Bexy said. “Do you have a Jack?”

“Go Fish.”

Bexy sighed heavily, drawing a card. Stella could kind of see her hand, it was true, but she wasn’t going to act on that.

They finished the game; Bexy won. “Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Okay.”

“Am I your best friend?”

Stella stared at her.

“Because you’re my best friend,” Bexy said, quickly, shyly, after a moment of Stella saying nothing.

It wasn’t that Stella didn’t think about Bexy. It was that Stella rarely considered the actual geometry of Bexy’s life, what Bexy did when Bexy-and-Stella, the fundamental unit, was temporarily split. Part of Stella had assumed that Bexy had rescued every other girl in the neighborhood, sat on the floor playing Go Fish with every other girl in the neighborhood, conspired with the mother of every other girl in the neighborhood to choose presents the mother almost certainly wouldn’t be able to afford without some modest assistance from the Barneses. To know this wasn’t true felt, Stella imagined, like an angelic visitation, vertiginous and bright.

“Who else would be my best friend?” Stella asked. “You’re my only friend, Bexy.”

Bexy wrinkled her eyebrows for a second, looking somehow both annoyed and very slightly sad. Then her face straightened out again. “You think you don’t have any other friends? Really?”

“I don’t.”

“What about Frances?”

Of course, there was Frances. It was odd, certainly, but it was true: Stella had another friend, and her name was Frances. “Well, you’re my best friend, at least,” Stella said.

Bexy rolled her eyes genially and shuffled their cards.

 

* * *

 

Stella read _Jane Eyre_. She struggled to do basic arithmetic. She drew her mother, Bexy, and various buildings and plants around their neighborhood. She also drew the Mary panel of stained glass, and once, she drew Frances, though she never did again, because Frances crossed her arms and said, “you know, you might ask before you stare long enough to draw something like that,” when Stella showed her. (Frances was much more like Stella than Bexy was. It was disorienting, sometimes, to be friends with such a person.)

Bexy took care of her brothers and sisters. She looked flat and obedient when her mother spoke to her. She let Stella draw her. She did Stella’s arithmetic. She read a few chapters of Jane Eyre , then asked Stella, “how’d you get through this thing,” looking worried.

Frances took care of her brothers and sisters. She managed to repair her stockings and polish her shoes. She didn’t say much to Stella outside of church. She was funny in a different way from how Bexy was funny. Stella sensed that Frances was smarter than her, but she never teased anybody, not even the worst and meanest members of their Sunday school class. Stella sensed that Frances lacked a capacity for terribleness, but also that Frances was not Beth March. This seemed unfair to people who were neither Frances nor friends of Frances.

Bexy was not a friend of Frances.

 

* * *

 

They were thirteen when Frances caught pneumonia and died. Her lungs were already bad from being in the damp and cold all those years--this is what Sara told Stella. She wasn’t at church for a few weeks straight in late October and early November, and then she wasn’t alive anymore. Stella didn’t visit her; Stella had never been to the Linnanes’ apartment, not once.

She went to the Linnanes’ apartment for the wake. Mrs. Linnane looked very brave. Mr. Linnane’s face was puffy with crying. The baby Linnanes didn’t seem to understand what had happened at all.

Stella’s mother had told her that people in Ireland saw death differently from how they did here in America--it happened more there, and closer. Of course people die here too, Sara had said, but it’s better hidden, see? Except for nurses; we see death. And we Catholics see death.

Stella wasn’t sure whether her mother was including herself in the category of American or Irish, but she supposed it didn’t matter: either way, Sara was a nurse and a Catholic, too. Her death-vision was either double or triple.

“She was so kind to Frances,” Mrs. Linnane said to Stella’s mother. Then she turned to Stella. “You were so kind to Frances.”

Stella didn’t know what to say. She had been crying at strange intervals all week. She had had pneumonia more times than she could count. Her lungs were worth nothing. All she had was her mother and Bexy, who rescued her and told her she was like Jo March and sat on her floor to play Go Fish. Stella knew she hadn’t survived on her own, or on her body’s, merits; she had survived on Sara Rogers and Bexy Barnes’s.

She started to cry again. Maybe that for the best: it was better than saying nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

Bexy didn’t hug Stella often, but a few days after that, when Stella came back to school (she had gotten sick, and slept, and didn’t say anything to Bexy when she visited), she did. “I’m so sorry, Stel,” she said.

Stella stood with Bexy’s arms around her. Then she moved away. “You never even talked to Frances,” she told Bexy.

Bexy blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You never said a word to her.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You didn’t.”

“She never talked to me!”

“Because she knew you didn’t want to talk to her.”

“Why wouldn’t I--Stella, what are you talking about?”

“You didn’t want to talk to her, because she was poor and ugly.” Bexy began to speak again, but this time, Stella didn’t stop. “Like me. But you were stuck with me. And now Frances is dead, and--”

“ What ,” Bexy said.

“--and that’s it. So. You don’t have to be sorry . Don’t be sorry for me,” Stella said, as meanly as she could, and then she started walking away from Bexy, down the alley that led to her fire escape, where she could sneak inside without her mother saying a word to her.

Bexy followed her. “Please tell me what--”

“You don’t have to be my friend, Bexy,” she said, and then she climbed up her fire escape, which was too rusted and fragile to bear the weight of two. She slid her window open, slammed it shut, and went to lie in bed, where she gasped, winded to the point of agony, for several minutes. After that, she fell asleep. Stella was tired.

 

* * *

 

Thus began a period that would not be repeated for a decade and a half, and then for largely (though not entirely) different reasons. For seven weeks, Stella Rogers and Bexy Barnes did not speak to each other. Or, rather, Stella did not speak to Bexy. That was foremost among the differences between this and their later period of silence.

Now Stella was truly friendless.

She drew her mother, and various plants and buildings around the neighborhood. She didn’t draw Frances. She didn’t draw Bexy. It was winter, and she had trouble breathing.

 

* * *

 

Bexy, it seemed, had kissed a boy on the cheek. She told Ellie Ryan this, walking home from school, and Stella couldn’t help overhearing. (Bexy had friends.)

 

* * *

 

One of the Irish girls said to Stella, “you like drawing, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Stella said.

“You want to draw me?”

Stella drew her. In exchange, the girl braided Stella’s hair.

And so: Stella had friends again. She was still sick, but she wasn’t getting any sicker than she did every winter.

Some terribleness goes unpunished. Stella knew this, now. She knew she was free of God. This was not something she wanted to be, but she had little choice.

 

* * *

 

She waited until Bexy was alone, walking down her street after all her friends had walked down theirs. Then she approached her. She didn’t know how to start, so she walked along until Bexy noticed.

Bexy didn’t startle physically, but her eyes widened. She looked momentarily terrified, the way girls in movies looked before they died.

Stella waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. So Stella spoke instead.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was awful. You’re my best friend.”

Bexy stared at her. Then she said, “Why?”

Why am I your best friend. Why did you stop talking to me. Stella knew why. She also knew (believed, actually, but she thought she knew) that Bexy wouldn’t understand it. “I don’t know,” she said. And then she hugged Bexy.

Bexy stood still before hugging Stella, tightly.

 

* * *

 

At Midnight Mass, the priest read Frances’ name and a prayer. The Rogerses sat with the Barneses, and Stella did not cry. She had decided that she was through with crying in front of anyone. She had also come to some other decisions. Among them: the priest reading Frances’ name and a prayer meant very little, if anything at all.

The next morning, long before sunrise, Stella woke up to snowballs pelted at her window. There Bexy stood, grinning and alive.


	2. Chapter 2

“You just want to own people,” Bexy said. “It’s nothing like caring. You just want to own me.” This had either really happened or happened in a nightmare, but Stella couldn’t exactly ask Bexy for clarification. She had to assume it had really happened. Because it had really happened—if it had, in fact, really happened—Stella couldn’t cry about it. She’d never been able to cry about anything real.

Fiction (dreams included) was a different matter. Just days ago, she had cried at the end of Dracula, wet, grating sobs, and then she returned the book to the library, faking sneezes to explain away her reddened eyes.

This was all in the first week of Stella being sixteen. It was a thin-aired, white-light summer, colder than usual, and Bexy and Stella had shared a secret cigarette on Stella’s birthday, legs dangling off the edge of Stella’s fire escape. It was a wonder the thing didn’t collapse under their combined weight.

Bexy had been seventeen since early March. “You don’t feel different?” Bexy had asked Stella, expelling smoke flashily from her nostrils. It reminded Stella of snot rocket competitions when they were eight, though she didn’t bring this up. “Damn.”

“You said you didn’t feel different when you turned seventeen, either,” Stella said.

“Yeah, well,” Bexy said. “You’re always better at feeling this kind of thing.”

This shocked Stella, who had been in the middle of a drag. She coughed. “What?” she said. Bexy tried to thump her on the back; Stella swatted her hand away. “Leave me alone, mother. I’m better at feeling this kind of thing? What’s that mean?” Stella wasn’t good at feeling much of anything, from everything she’d gathered.

“You’re better at feeling the kind of thing that you have to see your life like a movie you’re watching to feel,” Bexy said.

“I have no idea what you just said,” Stella replied. Bexy shoved her, jammed their cigarette into the brick wall of the building behind them, and said, “you want your present?”

Stella suspected that Bexy had told her that she just wanted to own people a few months ago, and that it had slipped Stella’s mind until now. That is, if Stella hadn’t dreamed it in the first place. Dreaming it seemed much too lucky.

It was true that turning sixteen didn’t make Stella feel any different. Stella thought it was an insane lie that turning seventeen hadn’t made Bexy feel any different, as Bexy hadn’t been eighteen for a month before she’d gotten her first serious boyfriend, whose name was Dan Wallach. After that fire escape cigarette, Bexy had left a small wrapped box with Stella, hugged her in that swinging way that always felt like the physical equivalent of a raised eyebrow, then said, “bye,” and gone off to sit outside somewhere with Dan’s friends, who were now her friends, too.

Stella had told Bexy she didn’t want her around past seven or so, because Stella was tired. That was why Bexy left to sit outside somewhere with her and Dan’s friends. When they were younger, Bexy did what Stella told her to much less frequently.

There were, of course, the fireworks: Stella had been born, in one of the greater embarrassments of her life, on the fourth of July. Stella and her mother watched these from one of the stronger sections of the roof. They hadn’t done this without Bexy since Stella and Bexy had known each other.

Now, Stella had been sixteen for a week. Bexy’s present had been charcoal pencils that probably cost more than Stella’s shoes. Stella hadn’t drawn anything with them yet.

 

* * *

 

Stella had never gotten anyone sick, because the main problem of her sicknesses wasn’t germs but her particular body’s inane reaction to germs. What laid Stella low for weeks generally resulted in a few hours of slight congestion for anyone else. Getting people sick was not why Stella cried at Dracula.

She cried at Dracula because, in Dracula, there were some types of evil that you had to kill to get rid of.

“Yeah,” Bexy had said, slowly, when Stella told her. She looked at Stella like Stella had been lobotomized recently. “Is that news?”

It was news, and it gave Stella two options: she could believe in neither killing nor evil, or she could believe in both killing and evil. She couldn’t have it both ways, and she was pretty certain she’d seen evil.

Practically, the issue was how to know whether what you were killing was evil. Suddenly, it seemed to be of overwhelming importance that Stella could identify evil with certainty.

Evil could be many things: any one of the seven deadly sins, and a lot else besides. Stella thought, mostly, about envy, greed, and the intersection thereof.

Of course Stella wondered whether she herself was the type of evil that you had to kill to get rid of. But that was a question she didn’t trust herself to answer.

 

* * *

 

Stella was sitting on the edge of the bath; Bexy was fixing her hair. This would be the first double date Stella had ever been conscripted into.

“Are you and Dan getting hitched?” Stella asked. It wasn’t a genuine question, or even a rib, so much as an escape plan.

Bexy laughed, as Stella had assumed she would. Stella hadn’t prepared for the alternate answer, “yes,” because it made her sick to her stomach to consider it.

“Okay,” Stella said, “then why are you making me do this?” This meant going through the boyfriend-motions.

“You’d understand,” Bexy said, looking at herself in the mirror and not at Stella, “if you had a boyfriend.”

It wasn’t exactly true that Stella had never been able to cry at anything real. She had cried about the prospect of this double date, the previous night, more at the conceptual injustice of it than anything else. She had asked Bexy, point-blank, whether she had to attach Stella to a boyfriend to justify spending so much time with her. Bexy had looked genuinely puzzled and said, “you’re really nuts,” which had been less comforting than it might have, because it left Stella with even less explanation for this whole exercise. (When Stella cried, it was partly with relief: relief that Bexy didn’t have to justify Stella—or, better, that she did, but refused to.)

Dan’s friend had gigantic teeth and a gigantic grin and a name, which Stella couldn’t remember, that started with an A. Dan didn’t remove his arm from Bexy’s shoulder the whole time they were out. Bexy and Dan were both great dancers, and they spun around the floor, Bexy’s skirts flying up in their wake. Stella and A-something gave up after one dance: they were terribly height-matched, Stella something like a foot shorter, and Stella had even less enthusiasm than she did rhythm. Not wanting him to feel bad, she said, by way of explanation, “I’ve got bad lungs,” which was true. Stupidly, though, she lit up within ten minutes of saying so, which made her look like a liar (rather than just an idiot, which she was).

The boys walked them both to Stella’s building—Stella’s mom had a night shift, and neither Bexy nor Sarah Rogers liked Stella alone in that walkup apartment, and the Barnes house was hot and crowded something awful in September. Stella turned away as Bexy stood tip-toe to kiss Dan. She gave an effortful smile to A—.

“You have fun?” Bexy asked, scrubbing her face in the kitchen sink. When Stella didn’t respond, she turned around. “What’s the matter with you?”

Stella folded her arms. “Yeah,” she said.

Bexy rolled her eyes extravagantly. “Yeah what?”

“It was fine.”

They glared at each other for a minute. Then Bexy threw her hands in the air. “Okay,” she said, “okay. You hated it, you hate Arthur, you hate me.”

Arthur. “No I don’t.”

“Uh huh.”

“What do you want me to say?” Stella shrugged and started edging towards her bedroom. “What? I didn’t love it. Are you happy?”

“Yeah, well,” Bexy laughed, mirthlessly, “no one does.” When Stella squinted at her, she said, “Kidding. Jesus H.”

“Okay.” Neither of them spoke for a moment. “He’s just too tall for me,” Stella said, finally.

Bexy managed to keep glaring for several seconds before her face split into a grin. She laughed so hard she crumpled onto the sofa, and Stella went with her.

“Yeah,” Bexy said, “bad choice, maybe.”

“You’ve gotta find a dwarf for me.” Stella tried to look solemn. “It’s nothing against him. I’m just too frail to reach up that far to kiss someone, you know.”

“Too frail to kiss, but not too frail to claw holy hell out of my arm every time we go to the movies.”

“That’s from the drawing! It’s just grip strength.”

“Well, that might not help you with the kissing, but it’ll come in handy down the line.” She beamed.

Stella battered her with a couch cushion until Bexy cried, “uncle, uncle.” Then they pushed the couch cushions to the floor and lay next to each other. Stella fell asleep so fast, she hardly had time to wonder whether Bexy’d had use for her own grip strength yet.

 

* * *

 

There were, of course, other dates. As the weather changed, Stella’s body buckled and rebelled and had to be dealt with, but between intervals of bedrest, Bexy carted her off to meet boy after boy, all of whom looked vaguely related, all of whom (after Arthur) were no more than five inches taller than Stella. That, at least, was a mercy, though she still didn’t kiss them.

She kissed one of them. His name was Jacob Lake, and he looked a little like Clark Gable, if Clark Gable were really short. He also loved Leon Trotsky, apparently. “Bexy here says you’re a Goldman girl,” he told Stella, a little teasing, as they walked to the movies, a few paces behind Bexy and Dan.

“So long as she means Emma, not Sachs,” Stella replied. Jacob laughed.

They argued lightly, then agreed lightly, then watched Mutiny on the Bounty. This was when the Clark Gable comparison occurred to Stella. It was the type of thing one ought to be excited about, she imagined.

Bexy and Dan had the grace not to fool around in their aisle—probably they realized it was going unusually well for Stella, and Bex didn’t want to mess it up. Stella couldn’t imagine Dan much cared either way, though Jacob was, distantly, his friend.

When they went out for a second double date—that, alone, a rarity—Bexy pulled her aside and told her, “this one’s into you.” That struck Stella as absurd to the point of incomprehensibility: he was almost as handsome as Dan, in his own way. (Dan had Stella’s coloring and a sharp face. Stella thought, privately, that he looked like a normal man who had been whittled at too long. But he certainly did well for himself, anyway.) When Stella gaped, Bexy hissed, alarmingly severe for the situation, “you can’t possibly be that surprised, idiot. You look beautiful.” Before Stella could say anything to that, Bexy went on, “I’m just saying, if you like him…” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully.

“What?”

“Oh my god,” Bexy muttered. “Stella, just indicate it. Don’t look at him like you’re gearing up to argue with a nun whenever he talks.”

Stella started to say, That’s just how I look, Bex, but thought better of it. “Okay,” she said, and did her best to indicate. This time, they were at Coney Island, and Stella touched his arm, smiled up at him from under her lashes, walked slowly so they weren’t too close to Bexy and Dan. (That seemed to be most of the point of this whole Jacob thing: that Stella would get off Bexy’s back for a minute.) Stella even pretended to be flattered when he won her a particularly garish stuffed animal they’d been making fun of at the ring toss. “My hero,” she said, but managed not to sound like she was accusing him of chauvinism.

Jacob leaned in to kiss her as the ferris wheel neared its apex. Stella acknowledged it as her first kiss as she acknowledged the chill discomfort of it. She tried to kiss back, but making it enjoyable for anyone seemed like a Sisyphean task. He couldn’t possibly like the dead meat feeling of Stella’s thin lips against his.

Jacob pulled back and looked at her. To her own annoyance, Stella smiled tightly, leaned away from him, and turned to stare out the window until they rounded the other side of the circle and came to a rest.

They kept walking around for another half an hour, Jacob buying Stella an ice cream cone and making conversation. But Stella was too queasy (from the rides, she told herself provisionally) to make any real inroads on the cone. She could barely grit out a response longer than three words before she felt an awful fluttering tightness in her chest and had to distract herself. Bexy’s eyebrows knit together when she saw Stella’s face, and she kept cutting her eyes over to Stella nervously on the train ride back.

“Are you okay?” Bexy, who’d sat next to Stella (across from Dan and Jacob), asked. Stella nodded tersely and made her eyes too glassy to see through. She could feel Bexy’s arm against hers, and from the rides became a frailer excuse every time Bexy spoke or laughed or breathed so close. Jacob, Stella knew, was stealing nervous glances at her, but she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes.

When they made it to Stella and Bexy’s stop, Stella said, “I’m not feeling well.” She started to shuffle surreptitiously away from the group. “I’d better go home.”

“I’ll walk you,” Jacob said, but before he had even finished forming the sentence, Stella was exclaiming, “that’s fine!” and speeded up her pace, turning away.

“I,” Jacob started, following her, and Stella turned back to him. “It’s really okay,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Thanks. That was nice.”

This time, when Jacob opened his mouth, Stella just said, “No, really.” That, finally, shut him up, and she took off, nearly jogging.

She hadn’t been aboveground long before Bexy caught up with her. “What the hell,” Bexy said.

“I thought Dan was walking you home.”

“I thought Jacob was walking you.”

Stella flinched, then tried to mask the movement as a particularly hard blink. “The rides made me sick,” she said. “I think I have to go puke into a bush. Sorry I didn’t want a guy I barely know watching that.”

Bexy crossed her arms. “I know what you damn well look like when you’re about to puke, Rogers,” she said.

Stella didn’t respond. When she tried to turn away again, Bexy grabbed her arm. “Stella,” she said, panic suddenly in her voice. Her grip wasn’t painful, but there was a frantic tremor in it. “Did he do anything to you?”

This time, Stella blinked in earnest confusion. “What?”

“Did he do anything.”

Stella’s eyes widened. “Of course not,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I tell—of course he didn’t do anything.”

“It looked like it was going well.”

“Well,” Stella said, and her mouth went dry. She cleared her throat. “I really have to go. Please, Bex.”

Bexy’s eyes flicked over Stella’s face for a moment, and then she sighed. “Just let me walk you home,” she said. Pleaded, really: her face was terribly soft, limned by the streetlamp’s glow.

Just sick from the rides broke open: Bexy was beautiful. Bexy was warm in the faint October chill. Bexy’s lips had a divot Stella wanted to reach out and touch. Stella wanted to touch the dimple in Bexy’s chin, too, and her pale collarbone, visible between the sloping neck of her dress and the loose lapels of her unbuttoned coat.

“I’m sorry,” Stella said. “Gotta be alone. I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?” She touched Bexy’s arm, stiffly, before walking away.

Stella didn’t kiss Jacob again.

 

* * *

 

 

Was this something to be redeemed from? Stella didn’t know. But toward the end of November, she reread _Dracula_ , and this time, it didn’t make her cry.

Bexy kept taking Stella on double dates, but she never pulled Stella aside and said anyone was _into_ her again. Stella knew less about what Bexy was thinking than she did about anything else, but she guessed this might be a sign of defeat.

Stella didn’t apologize, the same way she didn’t apologize for chain-smoking until coughing overtook her and Bexy tried to look like she wasn’t crying. It wasn’t the smoke that hurt Bexy, but the fear. Or it was the smoke: she felt it burning in her own lungs the way it burned in Stella’s. Stella, despite her best efforts, couldn’t help searching for the limit of Bexy’s piercing empathy, the line where exhausted love turned into pure exhaustion. She couldn’t help wanting to run past it. This, at least, would show Bexy where they stood: Bexy in the land of the living, Stella on some other shore.

What Stella didn’t want Bexy to see was her outstretched arms. _Take me with you_ , Stella didn’t think, but felt, watching Bexy smile into Dan’s shoulder; _don’t leave me here_. Find a raft, and drag me aboard. Drown with me, if you have to.

But Bexy had the whole world, and her dimpled chin besides. She would do anything for Stella but cross over.


	3. Chapter 3

Bexy got into nursing school the day Stella went to her first queer bar. Apparently, Bexy ran over to the Rogers’ that Friday night, having found the acceptance letter after returning home from a date with Dan. But their apartment was empty: Sarah was on a shift, Stella in slacks from the back of her mother’s closet, elbows pressing into a sticky bar, with a cocktail of mysterious provenance clutched in one shaky hand and a slow-burning Lucky in the other.

Al, a twig-thin man whose haircut Stella envied, was perched on a stool next to her. “How’d you hear about us, then?” he asked cheerfully. Stella was actively suppressing the instinct to remove herself from the situation. It was unlikely enough a man would try anything on her in here; anyway, if Stella could take anyone, it was this guy.

She rubbed the back of her neck. “Um,” she said, “I’m in—there’s a red group I’m in, sort of. In Flatbush. And someone from there…”

Someone from there—Luce, middle-aged and short-haired—had seen her reaction to a guy on the street moving to squeeze Stella’s waist. It seemed that this reaction belied a huge swath of Stella’s interior life. Luce scrawled an address on a receipt and shoved it at Stella. “Careful, kid,” she told her. “Gotta stay alive first.” First what, before what, Stella had thought, but after weeks of nausea she’d bitten the bullet and gone.

Bexy knew Stella went to the red group. She didn’t like it, but she couldn’t say much: it was respectable, peaceful, more lectures than riots.

Bexy sure as shit didn't know Stella was at the bar.

Al grinned. “Best way to hear,” he said. Then he started gesturing wildly, and another man, this one broader but also gentler-looking, appeared. “This is Maurie,” he said, kissing the other man’s cheek. Stella knew this didn’t necessarily indicate anything other than general homosexuality, but something about the tenderness of the gesture made it romantic. This, more than anything else that night, made Stella’s face burn. She was watching love, she realized, and she was surprised by just how much it hurt her.

They talked more, and then Al introduced her to some women, and eventually Stella left, exhausted and less exhilarated than she’d hoped but with a warmth in her. She found a note slipped under the front door when she got home. “About to get better at patching you up,” she read, in Bucky’s clean cursive. Stella’s face broke into a grin, but when she realized Bex must have come around looking for her, she kicked herself.

She fell asleep too quick to think about it long, but the next day, she sprang out of bed and sprinted (quietly as she could, so as not to wake her mother) out of their apartment and down the block to the Barnes’s. Bexy shared a room with her younger sisters, so Stella couldn’t very well throw rocks the way Bexy sometimes did, but she could still climb the fire escape.

Theoretically. It took doing, but after some time, wheezing but intact, Stella made it to Bexy’s window. After all, it was a warm April, and Stella’s body had bounced back better than normal from its winter rigmarole.

Bexy was drooling into her pillow, but her sisters had already risen. Sleeping in was probably allowed as a treat for Bexy, making it into school. Stella jimmied the window open. “Hey,” she hissed. When Bexy didn’t wake up, she said, louder, “I’m never going to a ward again, thanks to you!”

“Because you’d hate the ward for my presence, or because you’d have me at home ministering to you? Hoping the latter,” Bexy said. Her eyes were still closed; she didn’t seem entirely awake. Stella, embarrassed without knowing quite why, knocked at the sill, hard. “Jane Rebecca Barnes,” she said.

Bexy’s eyes flew open. “Jesus Christ, Rogers,” she said, unreadable for a second, before her face broke into a smile. “Moron. You climbed up?”

“Special occasion,” Stella said. “Anyway, my lungs’re never complaining again, thanks to your expertise. Let me in, will you?”

Bexy popped the screen and helped Stella wiggle through. Her hair was springing out of its overnight braids, her nightgown bunched up around her neck. Stella couldn’t stop smiling at her. “You’re in a real good mood about this,” Bexy said. “I’m not even in that good a mood about it. Gonna have more blood on my hands—I’m talking literally—than I’ve got so far. Which is already too damn much,” she intoned, putting her palms near Stella’s face. “Your guts’re all over these.”

“I told you,” Stella said, “I’m in it for the free medical care. God knows I need it,” and she sat at the foot of Bexy’s bed.

Bexy, to Stella’s surprise, sat close, facing her, bare toes resting on Stella’s thigh. “Maybe I’ll start charging you,” she said. “A dollar a splint. How’s that sound?”

“Like highway robbery,” Stella said, working to keep her voice even. “Anyway, you’ll need practice for awhile. I’ll be your test dummy.”

“I bet you will,” Bexy said. She paused, and Stella felt, suddenly, the full weight of Bexy’s age: eighteen now. When she was eleven, Stella ten, that wouldn’t have meant anything, but now—now Stella thought about her own body, and Bexy’s, and—“Because you’re dumb,” Bexy clarified, and Stella shoved her legs away in retribution.

Bexy’s mother knocked on her door eventually, and Stella beat a hasty retreat. But that afternoon, after she’d worked on her drawings and made (terrible) soup with her mother and done a shift redoing hems for Mrs. McCullough, she managed to lift a bottle of brandy from McCullough’s back office. She met up with Bexy in front of her building. Surprisingly, Bexy hadn’t had plans with Dan—or, if she did, she’d lied about them to Stella, and changed them as soon as Stella left. They were getting celebratorily sloshed.

Stella felt guilty, of course, that her good mood was only about half due to Bexy’s success. It was as though she’d ripped the bandage off a wound that still looked bad, but was healing better than she’d expected. The bar she’d been to was called The Neck, a stupid name if Stella’d ever heard one (something to do with the shape of the chairs the building used to be filled with, apparently). Stupid name or no, she planned on coming back.

Not that she’d met anyone, really. But that hadn’t been the point.

“My last taste of delinquency,” Bexy said, when Stella unsheathed the bottle. They had made a nest in the corner of Stella’s room. It was a closet with a window, really, but it gave them privacy, which Bexy’s house couldn’t boast.

Bexy actually winked at Stella. Stella felt like she had been pumped full of helium.

“I’m still more delinquent than you are,” Stella said. “I stole it. From my employer. And I’m sixteen.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bexy took a swig. “Forgot I’m corrupting a youth. Sorry, Stell.” Stella whacked her on the arm.

They were both far gone, leaning hard against each other, when Bexy told Stella, “Dan made it with Kathleen Michaels. Three times.”

Stella’s eyebrows shot up. “When’d he have time for that?” She hadn’t known Dan’d dated anyone much before Bexy.

Bexy smiled slowly. She ticked off on her fingers. “May,” she said, “then September, then January.” Then she spread all five fingers on both hands. “And who knows when the fuck else, considering.”

Too drunk to stop herself, Stella felt her jaw drop. “What the fuck!”

“Be quiet,” Bexy hissed, elbowing her in the stomach. “Jesus H.”

“What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck, Bexy,” Stella hissed back. “He stepped out on you?”

“Looks like it,” Bexy said, smiling serenely.

Stella stared at her. “He,” she started, and realized she didn’t have any more statements to make. “How’d you find out? And—when?”

“October,” Bexy said. “About the first two. From Lizzy Bryan, if you can believe it.” Lizzy Bryan was almost unbelievably mousy. “She’s like you; got a nose for justice. Last one, I got from Kathleen herself. Yes, Stella, the very same,” she responded to Stella’s expression. “Thought it was a good old-fashioned insult. And boy was she right.” Bucky leaned against the wall, grinning even wider. “I’m insulted as hell.”

Stella grabbed Bexy’s arm without quite meaning to. “Does Dan know you know?”

“Who the hell knows.” Bexy took a sip from the bottle; held it up, like she was toasting. “To the dumb-as-rocks,” she said, and drank again.

“You think Dan’s dumb?”

“You think I’m dumb?” Bexy asked. “I got eyes, same as you. And I gotta look at him all the time.”

Stella blinked, dumbfounded. “But you two…”

“We’re together,” Bexy said. “Yeah. Are we ever.” She laughed. “Are we ever,” she repeated.

Stella didn’t ask Bexy whether she’d made it with him. She knew the answer, and hearing it aloud would probably lead her to stupid, unjustifiable tears. She was as bad as Dan, really.

You just want to own me. Almost a year since that dream, or that memory, and she still didn’t know which it was.

“You don’t have to stay with him,” Stella said anyway. It seemed like the closest she could get to what a human being would say.

Bexy’s mouth quirked. “Oh, but I do.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a man,” she said, placid, “and I’m a woman.”

“What?”

“Oh my god, you’re dense. Money, Stella.”

Stella blinked at her. “You’re gonna be a nurse,” she said, enunciating carefully. “A good nurse. You’re gonna be fine.”

“That’s funny.”

“But you are!”

Bexy sighed, stretched her neck, and met Stella’s eyes again. “Maybe if it were just me,” she said.

Oh. “Your family?”

“I guess.”

“But—Bex, your dad’s got his job, and Frank’s—“

“I wasn’t talking about them.”

Stella stared at her.

“You,” Bexy said.

Stella didn’t say anything for a moment. She had to look away from Bexy, turning her face to the ceiling, and squinting back—what? Not tears, exactly, but something angry and hot all the same. “Oh, fuck you,” she said.

“What?”

“I might be, what, I might be short and, and sick,” Stella said, forcing herself not to shout, “I’m sorry I can’t get a boyfriend to save my life—I’m sorry I don’t have tits—”

“Jesus Christ—”

“But I’m as much of an adult as you are.”

“Oh, come on.”

Stella turned to look at her then, furious. Bexy looked tired. “You come on,” Stella hissed. “I’m my own goddamn person and—”

“I know you’re your own goddamn person, Stella. Oh boy do I know that. Listen.” Bexy put her hand on Stella’s knee, solemn. “You’re more your own person than I’m ever gonna be. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, for me—being everyone else’s person ain’t a walk in the park—but, fuck, I would die to keep that from ever not being true, alright? I would die.”

Their faces were so close. Stella breathed in brandy and perfume over the way Bexy had always smelled.

“I don’t want you to die,” Stella said, finally. When Bexy laughed, she repeated, emphatic, “I don’t.”

Bexy cleared her throat, smiling thinly. She leaned away from Stella, started picking at a hangnail.

“I don’t want you to stay with Dan because of me,” Stella continued. “Of all people.”

Bexy laughed again, realer this time. “I mean,” she said, “it’s not just because of you. It’s—you know, everything.”

“How people look at you.”

“Alright, the other thing maybe, but this you have no right to criticize me for. So I care. It’s not like it’s hurting you.”

“Yeah,” Stella said. She paused. “But if it’s hurting you, then—“

“It’s not hurting me, okay?” Bexy was rolling her eyes. “God. I like him a lot, cross my heart.” When Stella didn’t reply, Bexy said, softer, “I appreciate that you don’t want me miserable.”

“Well, I don’t.”

Bexy reached up to run a hand through Stella’s hair. Stella went stiff trying not to lean into the touch. “You’re crazy,” Bexy told her. “You’re a crazy goddamn person.”

“Hey,” Stella said weakly, failing to keep her voice even.

“No, but look. It’s wonderful. It’s my favorite thing, Stell.” Bexy was staring at Stella’s face, something unbearable in her expression. Stella couldn’t stand to look back; she looked back anyway. “I hope you’re crazy forever.”

They fell asleep side-by-side on Stella’s bed, the way they had a thousand times before: Bexy’s back against Stella’s front, Stella’s face tucked, naked of pretense, in the juncture between Bexy’s shoulder and neck. In sleep, Stella could breathe against her.

 

* * *

 

 

From June until August, Bexy had her nose buried, with few breaks, in a physiology textbook. Whenever Stella walked into the grocery, Bexy was staring at her lap behind the checkout counter, muttering “humerus, radius, ulna” or “piriformis, pectineus” or, often, just groaning, head in hands.

Stella didn’t have much of a head for Latin roots, but she could draw, so she helped Bexy the way she knew how: sketching out diagrams for her to label, testing Bexy by telling her to place bones within drawings Stella’d done of Bexy long ago. Stella’s sketchbooks filled up with Bexy Barneses whose bones, drawn in neatly but without particular grace by Bexy herself, showed through her shaded skin.

She also helped out by getting her nose broken, then nasally asking Bexy to explain what she was doing as she set the bone.

For the first time in her life, though, Stella couldn’t tell Bexy why her nose was broken in the first place. That was because it came out of a raid, a raid that came out of The Neck.

By the time summer had settled in on Brooklyn, Stella was going out every weekend. She was part of what Al called “the Rugrat Vanguard,” bug-eyed under-twenties among whom Stella was regarded as having been born with a silver spoon. The simple fact of her housing boggled the mind of Joan, a tall, heavy-drinking brunette who claimed to be 25 but was probably about Stella’s age. “You live with your ma? Where’s she think you are now?”

“She’s on a shift,” Stella said. “TB ward. Anyway, my best friend used to strong-arm me into a date every other day.”

Joan squinted. “Your best friend?”

“Yeah,” Stella said, before changing the subject.

A few weeks before Stella’s seventeenth birthday, she and Joan found themselves in a back closet of the bar. A few weeks after that, Stella ended up in the same place with Ellen-call-me-Len, who seemed embarrassed to be kissing another dame in trousers. It didn’t seem any more embarrassing to Stella than anything else about the Neck was. They were already lesbians, after all, already coughing dust as they fumbled around in near-darkness.

Stella received more trousers, sometimes in exchange for repairs and alterations on other garments. She cut her hair a little shorter—not nearly as short as Len’s, though. She met more people. She apologized to Joan for ignoring her completely following their encounter. (Joan told Stella that she made the rest of the Rugrats look like a council of elders with her maturity level, which was probably fair.)

She hid under a table after the Mob had a spat with the precinct chief and the cops responded by busting into the Neck, guns-first. They were usually lucky, Maurie explained; they had some scheme that involved lots of money changing hands and lots of averted glances, the result of which was that The Neck was unusually calm. But they weren’t exempt from the brutal algebra of money. Stella had been scooted out by the older ones, too dazed to try and fight. A few blocks away, though, she tripped out of her automatic sprint and bashed her face against the sidewalk. Stella probably looked worse than usual when she showed up by Bexy’s window, because Bexy looked worse than usual, too, joking too much and with too deep a wrinkle between her eyebrows.

Bexy asked directly, once, about Stella’s whereabouts. She’d mentioned a friend of Dan’s, and Stella had responded, too quickly, “I’m busy.” This had delighted Bexy, who asked, “busy with whose friend?”

“Nobody’s,” Stella replied. “I mean, mine.”

Probably realizing that she would be the first to know if Stella were to ever choose the friend-of-Dan’s path, Bexy didn’t ask many questions after that. She just looked more and more worried.

It was, more or less, like always: Stella quizzed Bexy, and Bexy laughed at Stella, and Stella, between work and drawing and the bar and Bexy, read a copy of The Well of Loneliness lent to her by Luce. But the individual pieces of new made a volatile combination, and Stella found herself staring at Bexy more often, resenting Dan with more vehemence, thinking despite herself of the differences and similarities between Bexy’s strong legs and Joan’s, Bexy’s long lashes and Len’s.

There was also Stella’s mother, who had, in a strange twist, become almost as sick as Stella that year. The summer did her good, but Stella found herself tiptoeing around her, struggling not to check her breathing as she slept, to force food on her on the rare occasions when neither of them was working through a meal. Sarah Rogers was the same as ever: strong, serious, private, dragging Stella along to church without asking her whether or not she much wanted to go. But there were hairline fractures running across her composed surface, and Stella found herself fearing what might happen if they grew.

Like always, more or less.

 

* * *

 

 

“I’m thinking of dropping out,” Stella told Bexy. It was late September, and they were both hunched over textbooks at Stella’s kitchen table. Stella had read the same equation eight times, trying to understand a single term, then decided to give up the charade.

Al had asked her the other week if she wanted to tend bar—she knew the Mob guys and the patrons both, now, and had stepped behind the counter enough times to know how to keep anyone from going home to his wife drunk, from letting her mother see her in a suit. She didn’t realize how much she really did want to until it was an option.

Bexy didn’t look up. “Aren’t we all,” she said, turning a page.

Stella didn’t say anything for a moment. When Bexy didn’t add anything, she continued, “I’m serious.”

This time, Bexy did look up. She stared at Stella for a moment, expressionless. “Really,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Bexy closed her book. “What the hell.”

“What the hell what?”

She wasn’t expressionless anymore: her eyes were narrowed dangerously, whole face tense. She pushed her chair back from the table a little, but didn’t stand. “After two years of your ma working her life away so you could go to school—”

“That’s the point,” Stella said. “I could be making money, and instead I’m spending it. When I explained to her why—”

“Oh,” Bexy said, “there’s a why!”

“Of course there is.” Stella was becoming more irritated the longer she watched Bexy reacting. “I can take classes at Cooper Union, you know, every few weeks. But I can also make money off drawings” (by this, Stella meant blue drawings, which she had developed quite the market for at the Neck) “and Mrs. McCullough says I can pick up shifts during the school day, start working more on the tailoring side of things. And I got another job, too, for nights.”

“You got another job.”

“Yeah.”

“What the fuck kind of other job,” Bexy said, slowly, “is hiring you?”

Stella blinked. “Well, thanks,” she said, crossing her arms. She was getting mad in earnest now.

Bexy realized her mistake. “I’m sorry, Stell, I didn’t mean—you know. But—”

“You know what? Fine,” Stella said. “It’s a queer bar.”

She blurted it out vindictively, but as soon as the chain reaction of the words began working across Bexy’s face, Stella felt a dark, chilling regret.

Bexy’s mouth had dropped open slightly, her eyes wide like she was witnessing a natural catastrophe no one could intervene against. She looked afraid.

Then she looked angry, which didn’t wash away the fear, but augmented it. “Are you out of your goddamn mind,” she hissed.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” Stella said, quickly, trying to retreat, to take it back, to get Bexy out.

“I don’t care what the fuck you tell me,” Bexy said. “I care that you’re apparently stupid enough to entertain this horseshit.”

“Horseshit? Bexy, I don’t care what you think, but these are people—”

“You think pouring shots for fairies is the meaning of your life? You think that’s what you’re here for?”

Stella flinched at the malice in Bexy’s voice. “Obviously not,” she replied, anger rising in her throat. “I think I’m here to do more than sit around in a classroom, learning things I can’t do—” she jabbed a finger at her hapless mathematical scribbles—“while people are dying, and pretend it isn’t happening.”

“While queers are dying,” Bexy said, like it was a correction.

Stella’s blood rushed in her ears. “Yes, people,” she said harshly. “Do you know, Mike Wheeler, he was an altar boy a few years older than us—”

“Fuck you,” Bexy said, even sharper.

“—and his parents, everybody, said a car hit him? That it was an accident? It was on purpose, Bex, it was a guy who’d seen him with his lover—”

“God dammit, Stella—”

“His lover told me this. His lover, who can’t even say he misses him—”

“So you want to get hit by a car, too? That’s what you want?”

“Well,” Stella said, “it isn’t really my choice, is it?”

Bexy looked like she’d been slapped. “What choice?”

“How I am,” Stella said. Her voice broke halfway through.

Then Bexy was laughing in mean, short barks. “You’re crazy,” she said, and it was nothing like how she’d said it all those months before, like crazy was something rare and holy. Crazy was stupid was cruel, now.

“You think I can stop this?” Stella was speaking, now, without fully meaning to, the words forcing themselves out. “You know what I was doing this summer, while you were with Dan” (Bexy looked, again, like she’d been struck) “you know—”

“You think that makes you—what? You think that’s worth laying down your life for?”

Stella breathed raggedly, staring at Bexy.

Bexy stared back. “I swear to god, Rogers, answer me.”

“You,” Stella said.

Bexy’s face was frozen. “What?”

“You’re what’s worth it.”

Now Bexy was shaking her head. “You’re not making sense.”

“I know because I can’t help—you. How I feel about you.”

“Stella,” Bexy said, almost pleading.

“I love you,” Stella said. “I don’t mean like sisters. You must know.”

“God dammit.” Bexy’s voice was suddenly thick. She was staring at the table, where her first were balled up before her.

Stella felt panic welling up. “After all these years,” she said, “after everything, if this is what you leave me for—I’d never act on it, you know that, you just—”

“Why did you tell me this,” Bexy said, covering her face with one hand.

“Because you asked.”

“But why did you tell me this.”

“You’d rather I lie?” Stella said, angry again. “You’d rather I make something up? I’m not gonna. I know you’re not like that—you don’t have to tell me twice—but you’ve gotta understand, Bex, this is real and—”

“I gotta go,” Bexy said, standing so fast she nearly knocked her chair over. She caught it at the last minute, then stared at the wood in her hand like she’d never seen it before.

Stella’s felt her mouth twist. “Really.”

“Yeah.” Now Bexy’s voice was horribly creaky. Stella could see her face, and it was blotchy and wet.

“Is this so awful for you? Does it bother you that much? Who I am? You can’t even stand me?”

“You’re so goddamn self-centered,” Bexy said, quietly devastated. She was out the door before Stella could ask her what she meant.

 

* * *

 

Stella didn’t fall asleep for hours. She had decided not to follow Bexy—hadn’t decided, really, but had been too angry and hurt and afraid to consider it. Her mother had come home, and they’d eaten together, and then her mother had coughed and Stella had listened and tried not to wince every time one resounded particularly deeply through Sarah’s lungs. She laid awake, listening to those coughs, until Sarah fell asleep. Then she lay awake and hated herself, dry-eyed with horror. She still couldn’t cry about anything real.

She must have drifted off eventually, though, because she woke up to knocking at her window. She nearly fell out of bed with the shock, but it was just Bexy, perched there, day-clothes still on. According to Stella’s clock, it was 2 in the morning.

Stella got up to open the window. “Bexy,” she said, “what are you—”

And then Bexy’s lips were on hers.

She was warm and tasted like whiskey. Her hands were on Stella’s face, in her hair. Her kisses were inexact, grazing Stella’s cheeks, her chin, her jaw, open-mouthed and frantic.

Stella pulled back. “Bex,” she said.

“Broke it off with Dan.” Bexy was breathing heavily, eyes terrible with some feeling Stella had only ever seen before in snatches. “If I did this before, my face would—he could tell.”

“He what?”

“Can I kiss you, Bexy said.

“Obviously,” Stella said. “I—Jesus.” Bexy had moved to her neck. “He could tell what?”

“I love you.” Bexy bit down gently. “Always. I always wanted this.”

“He could tell that?”

Bexy paused to give her a dry look. “No,” she said, “but he would’ve if I’d done this first,” and then she was kissing Stella’s mouth again. “So easy for you,” she said against Stella’s mouth.

“No, it’s not!”

“Shh,” Bexy said, which was fair: Sarah was asleep in the room next to them, and the walls were paper-thin. “I mean to say it. Or, I don’t know. Holy shit.” Her eyes tracked up and down Stella’s face. “You’re beautiful.”

Stella opened her mouth, but found she couldn’t quite speak. How, she wondered, did people live with this? How did people get anything done?

“What’m I gonna do,” Bexy muttered.

“I was wondering the same thing,” Stella managed. She wanted desperately to pull Bexy down to the bed, but Bexy was drunk, and Stella felt concussed, and they both had class in the morning.

Bexy seemed to be thinking the same thing. She blinked at the room, as though she couldn’t remember getting there, only getting to Stella. “Should go home.”

“Yeah,” Stella said, then, “you sure you… can? You can stay here.”

“Wouldn’t be able to sleep,” Bexy said, like it was nothing, and then the awful intensity was back on her face and she pulled Stella in and said, “love you,” again.

“Jesus,” Stella said again. “I—you too.” And Bexy disappeared through the window.


End file.
